Zulip History

Zulip at the PyCon Sprints in Portland, Oregon.
Over seventy-five people sprinted during the four day event.

Early history

Zulip was originally developed by Zulip, Inc., a small startup in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Zulip, Inc. was founded by the MIT team
that previously created
Ksplice, software for
live-patching a running Linux kernel. Zulip was inspired by
the Barnowl client for
the Zephyr
protocol, and the incredible community that Zephyr supported at MIT.

Zulip, Inc. was acquired by Dropbox in early 2014, while the product
was still in private beta. Zulip's beta
users loved
Zulip's unique user experience and continued using it, despite
the fact that the product was not being actively developed. After a
year and a half, Dropbox generously decided to
release Zulip as open source software
so that Zulip's users could continue enjoying the software.

Zulip was open sourced with the complete version control history
intact because 10 Zulip users visited Dropbox for a full week to
help with the technical work. The Zulip community is incredibly
grateful to both Dropbox and those enthusiastic early users for
making the Zulip open source project possible.

Success as an open source project

At first, the Zulip open source project was
maintained with just a bit of lead developer Tim
Abbott's nights and weekends. However, the
community steadily gained new contributors, and
has now grown to be one of the world's largest and
most active open source projects. We highlight a
few milestones below:

By the end of 2015, the open source project
was already going strong with a community of
dozens of developers around the world.

By late
2016, more
than 150 people from all over the world
had contributed almost 1000 pull requests to
the software, and the Zulip project was moving
faster than when the original startup employed
11 full-time engineers.

At the PyCon Sprints in May 2017, tens of
Zulip core developers gathered and led the
largest PyCon sprint ever, with over 75
developers contributing to Zulip over course
of the 4-day event.

Commercial (re-)launch

In 2016, Tim Abbott started a company, Kandra Labs, to
steward and financially sustain Zulip's development. Kandra
Labs was soon awarded
a large grant from
the US National Science Foundation, and also acquired
additional sources of funding.

In mid-2017, Kandra Labs launched two products: a hosted
Zulip service
at zulipchat.com,
and an enterprise support product for on-premise
deployments.

As of October 2018 the hosted service was seeing 4x year
over year growth in daily active users, and the
on-premise product was seeing rapid adoption (fueled
partly by the sunsetting of HipChat server).

Support

Kandra Labs is supported by nearly $1M
in SBIR
grants from the US National Science
Foundation, and Zulip has benefitted enormously
from the 30+ developers that started working on
Zulip
via Google
Summer of Code and
Google
Code-In.